r _us_; and as long as I
live I shall remember that! Oh"--She broke off; and dropped her face
with a pathetic, childlike helplessness on her lifted arm; and now he
was less than ever able to leave her. They all sat down again, after
they had risen to part; Matt felt the imperative necessity of
encouraging them; of rescuing her from the conjecture which she had
accepted as certainty. He was one of those men in whom passion can be
born only of some form of unselfish kindness; and who alone can make
women happy. If it was love that was now stirring so strangely at his
heart, he did not know it was love; he thought it was still the pity
that he had felt for the girl's immense calamity. He knew that from
every phase of it he could not save her, but he tried to save her from
that which now confronted them, and from which he saw her suffering. He
went over all the facts again with the hapless creatures, and reasoned
from them the probability that their father was still alive. It was
respite from sorrow which misery must follow; it was insane, it was
foolish, it was even guilty, but he could not help trying to win it for
them; and when he left them at last, they were bright with the hope he
had given them, and which the event, whether it was death or whether it
was disgrace, must quench in a blacker despair.

The truth of this rushed upon him when he found himself staggering away
from the doomed house which cast its light gayly out upon the snow, and
followed him with a perverse sense of its warmth and luxury into the
night. But a strange joy mixed with the trouble in his soul; and for all
that sleepless night, the conflict of these emotions seemed to toss him
to and fro as if he were something alien and exterior to them. Northwick
was now dead, and his death had averted the disgrace which overhung his
name; now he was still alive, and his escape from death had righted all
the wrong he had done. Then his escape had only deepened the shame he
had fled from; his death had fixed a stain of a blood-guiltiness on his
misdeeds, and was no caprice of fate, but a judgment of the eternal
justice. Against this savage conclusion Matt rebelled, and made his
stand.

XVIII.

For forty-eight hours longer the fact of the defalcation was kept back;
but then, in view of the legal action urged by those who did not accept
the theory of Northwick's death, it had to come out, and it broke all
bounds in overwhelming floods of publicity.